The proposed project seeks to determine to what extent phonological recoding in reading persists into older adulthood. Phonological recoding is the process of converting visually based representations of printed letter strings into sound-based representations. The focus of the proposed project is prelexical phonological recoding, which can operate before lexical access via application of sound-spelling conversions of orthographic units within the word. Although developmental research has suggested that like adults, children use both a phonological recoding route and a direct visual route in pronouncing and accessing letter strings, it appears that children rely more on the phonological route than young adults do. The proposed project is directed at the question of whether older adults (approximate age 65) rely on prelexical phonological recoding to the same extent as young adults (approximate age 20). To this end, six experiments are proposed which utilize three tasks: naming, lexical decision, and sentence acceptability judgment. In Experiments 1 - 3, performance on phonologically regular words (e.g., HINT) will be contrasted with performance on irregular (exception) words (e.g., PINT), providing tests for young and older adults' use of prelexical phonological recoding in processing items that are entirely familiar. In Experiments 4 - 6, pseudohomophonic nonwords such as JEAP will be contrasted with control pseudowords such as JELP, providing tests for how the processing of novel letter strings is affected by adult age. Existing empirical work on lexical processing and adult aging is narrowly focused, concentrating almost exclusively on the study of aging and spreading activation between related concepts in semantic memory. A benefit of the proposed research is that it will expand the range of psycholinguistic issues that have been studied with young and older adults in a theoretically important way. The results of the proposed experiments will be relevant to aging and health in that they will provide baseline data on how the processing of visually presented linguistic material is affected by normal adult aging. Without such data, the accurate assessment of abnormality in processing is impossible.